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The City on a Hill. The Cradle of Liberty. Beantown.
No matter how you refer to it, there’s no doubting Boston’s place in the landscape of American culture and history. A city defined by its revolutionary spirit, ferocious attachment to its sports teams, and stock of hearty, stiff-lipped citizens, Boston has also served as a launching pad and home for some of the world’s finest literary minds.
Snow. Day. Are there two words in the English language that, when strung together, elicit more joy in the heart of a child? Back in the day, news of a snow day was carried over a staticky radio. Hopeful kids listened for their school’s name in the cancellation list while tucked in bed or sitting in a warm kitchen that smelled of toast and freshly brewed coffee. When it made its alphabetical appearance, a typically quiet and sleepy morning house would be transformed into a household filled with excitement as children threw off their blankets and threw on their winter coats and mittens. Here are a few books that capture the miracle of snow and the magic of a day spent celebrating it.
Imagine Christmas Eve: Snow sifts down from the night sky, the fireplace glows red and crackles with warmth, and a stately looking family gathers in the living room with food and drink to regale each other with tales of the undead coming to life and psychologically taunting characters until they are driven to madness from fear. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night? Yes indeed. Sweet dreams, little ones.
For as odd as this scene might sound, the telling of ghost stories on the night before Christmas was and is a common tradition in England and throughout much of Europe.
There’s no clear-cut way to become a writer. A writer’s start, however, is almost always a small one. It takes a considerable amount of time to cultivate the talent that will amass attention, better pay, praise and prestige. That is, if those are the kind of things you’re into. But the road to artistic glory is necessarily a humble one. Few blossoming writers are in a position to turn down opportunities that pay and reach readers. And many times, a writer will settle for just the latter. In the end, these less glamorous ventures and gigs can prove essential to both the professional and artistic growth of the author. Let's explore how the following famous authors got their start.
Here at Books Tell You Why, we're excited to announce a new scholarship for Rare Book School! Beginning in 2016, we will send one winner per year to a RBS course of his or her choosing.
Saki was the pseudonym of short story writer Hector Hugh Munro. He adopted the name in 1900, and it's believed to have been taken from a character from the works of the Persian poet, Omar Khayyam. Most famous for his short stories, Saki also wrote novels and many articles of journalism. He remains an important figure in the tradition of modern English writers, although his politics and ideas may seem somewhat distant to us today.
When you think of a brewer, you don’t normally associate him or her with a sparkling literary career. But when you think of a brewer, you may not think of Brooklyn Brewery's brewmaster and author Garrett Oliver either.
For Oliver, beer is something more than a fizzy, alcoholic beverage we pull from the back of the fridge after a hard day at the office, or something we guzzle on Sunday afternoons while watching our team battle it out against a rival opponent. Beer is his life’s work and the subject of numerous essays, articles, and two highly-regarded books on the history and styles of beer, The Brewmaster’s Table, in 2003, as well as the uber-comprehensive, encyclopedic The Oxford Companion to Beer in 2011.
When one thinks of Beatrix Potter and her literary legacy—her delicate illustrations and charming stories that have delighted children and parents alike for over one hundred years—one does not necessarily think also of writers like E.L. James, John Grisham, or Edgar Allen Poe. But these writers, though they differ greatly in genre and in time, all have something in common with the celebrated naturalist and storyteller. Each of these writers, like Potter herself, began their literary careers by self-publishing. From her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, to Wag-by-Wall, the last of her stories published in her lifetime, Potter owes her considerable success to her own self-publishing efforts.
Today she’s known as the “doyenne” of Irish literature and a respected elder stateswoman of arts and letters throughout the English speaking world. Her awards are numerous and accolades esteemed, but when Edna O'Brien broke onto the international literary stage in 1960 with the publication of her novel The Country Girls, she was a struggling devotee of James Joyce working as a reader for a London-based publishing house.
